Gears of War 4.
Gears of War 4.
Gears of War 4 takes place 25 years after the Locust were defeated in Gears 3. The planet Sera has changed massively in that quartercentury with the COG becoming the baddies, exercising fascistic control over the populace with the help of a robotic army known as DBs. You play as James “JD” Fenix, son of Marcus Fenix (who has gone AWOL from the COG). Along with sidekick Del and Kait—the franchise’s first properly central female character—JD embarks on a raid of a COG establishment with the aim of stealing a Fabricator, which can make weapons and fortifications.
The merry band—moving through a world which, at last, hasn’t been entirely constructed using a color palette of black, brown and grey from the past Gears games—take on wave after wave of robots. After returning to the Outsider village and fending off a major COG assault, a new enemy, dubbed the Swarm, appears. The Swarm kidnaps Kait’s mother, Reyna and the rest of the village’s inhabitants.
JD and his cohorts then embark on a world-saving quest, with a first stop that involves approaching the now-grizzled Marcus Fenix. Along the way, Sera’s harsh climate occasionally intervenes: ‘windflares’ often strike, pairing beyond-hurricane-force winds with deadly localized lightning. In those sequences, impressive physics let you take out swathes of enemies by bringing the environment into play, often adding a puzzle-solving element to the game.
Boss battles and the various forms of the Swarm also force you to take a more tactical approach. Juvies, for example, are quick and elusive but unarmed, so they will melee you if you stay behind cover; Snatchers will swallow you up if you let them get too close, rendering you helpless until a team-mate shoots you out of their stomachs. You can play the campaign cooperatively, although AI-controlled team-mates are decent too. Overall, the single-player campaign off ers a much more varied, flowing experience than previous Gears of War games. It isn’t the longest, though, as you can finish it in about nine hours.
The game’s real meat lies online, in the form of Versus and Horde 3.0. In Versus, you can plunge into various multiplayer modes such as Warzone (team deathmatch with a single life per short-but-sweet round), Team Deathmatch (in which each team has an allocated number of lives), King of the Hill and Guardian. Plus, there is the intriguing Dodgeball, in which every time you kill an enemy, a dead teammate will respawn.
Another new mode, Arms Race, is likely to inspire either fanatical devotion or total indiff erence, as it forces you to cycle through all the game’s weapons during the match. Escalation, meanwhile is a new mode which has e-sports firmly on its agenda: it involves teams capturing three areas and ramps up respawn times at the end of each round.
Horde 3.0 chiefly benefits from the new mechanic provided by Fabricators, which let you build things like electrified fences, automatic turrets and various levels of decoys. You can move your Fabricator crate to whatever strategic place you feel you can best defend from the waves of incoming enemies, and the whole exercise adds a welcome level of strategy. But there is a caveat: Horde 3.0 introduces classes, and classes determines weapon load-out. You can, of course, pick up weapons from dead enemies, but pick the wrong class and you’ll be forced to use the weedy DB weaponry, which is annoying.
CONCLUSION
Updated single and multiplayer mechanics make the fourth Gears romp very enjoyable indeed.
Social playlists allow you to jump into the multiplayer and sample various game types at a time, with the ability to vote for the next map and mode. There’s an XP system which extends across both Versus and Horde 3.0, which is good, and a Gears Pack system which provides cards that bring some pretty appealing cosmetic enhancements for use in Versus, along with bounties (which are specific challenges), and some really useful perks and buffs that can be applied in Horde mode.
Overall, Gears of War 4 may adhere to a seemingly old-fashioned template but, in practice, it feels anything but archaic. Its single-player campaign is much more varied and engaging and the online mode is exhilarating, catering for all shades of gamers, from the less adept to those with pro aspirations. Horde mode thoroughly deserves its 3.0 designation and as a whole, provide the Gears of War template a rejuvenating shot in the arm it sorely needed.
PICTURES MICROSOFT.
